Hungry for Humans: What's Behind Deadly Animal Attacks?

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Dark reports began circulating in December, after the mutilated
body of a 65-year-old man was found in northern India. Since
then, nine additional human deaths have been blamed on
"Mysterious Queen," the name given to a large Bengal tigress with
a taste for human flesh.

The exact identity of the tiger hasn't
yet been established — wildlife officials aren't even sure if
it's one tiger or two — but that hasn't stopped villagers in
India's Uttar Pradesh and Uttarakhand states from taking extra
precautions when venturing outside their homes.

Wildlife attacks like these have been increasing in a few parts
of the world, and some experts believe, for a number of reasons,
that humans — unaccustomed to being prey — might start appearing
on more predators' dinner menus in the future. [ In
Photos: The 10 Deadliest Animals ]

The latest tiger-attack victim in India was Ram Charan, a
45-year-old irrigation contractor working near Jim Corbett
National Park, a reserve established in 1936 to protect the
region's iconic Bengal tigers and other wildlife.

Charan was walking through the forest near his truck when a tiger
attacked him, according to news reports. "People rushed to his
rescue on hearing his screams," a local wildlife official told
the
Times of India. "But he was dead by the time they reached
him."

The tiger might have attacked a human out of desperation, one
local official said. "The animal has started attacking humans,
because it is not getting its natural prey," Rupek De, chief
wildlife warden of Uttar Pradesh, told the
Associated Press.

Indeed, when a carnivorous animal attacks a human, experts often
point to a low population of the animal's usual prey. In a study
detailed in 2013 in the journal Human-Wildlife Interactions,
researchers at the Berryman Institute of Utah State University
examined attacks by leopards in
and around India's Binsar Wildlife Sanctuary.

The researchers found that leopards had been forced to kill
livestock in the study area. "The high depredation rate [of
livestock] was the result of the low density of wild prey species
in the wildlife sanctuary," the study authors concluded.

Chillingly, the researchers also noted that hungry leopards in
India had found another source of meat: "In the absence of wild
prey species, leopards tend to become man-eaters," the study
authors wrote. "The entire hilly region of Uttarakhand state has
been historically known as an area where man-eating leopards
exist, and they may exist all across the hill districts of
Uttarakhand."

People living in India have another reason to be concerned:
Wildlife census reports revealed the number of leopards in the
country had increased markedly, from 6,830 in 1993 to 9,850 in
2001.

Wildlife officials believe that if one tiger is responsible for
the 10 recent attacks in northern India, it probably traveled
about 80 miles (130 kilometers) in search of food.

And more of these predatory animals seem to be on the move,
according to numerous reports. Though they were once hunted to
the point of extinction, during the 20th century, the populations
of many apex predators — carnivores with few or no predators of
their own — rebounded, due, in large part, to endangered-species
protections.

"When I was a boy growing up in Florida during the 1950s,
alligators were endangered, and I never saw one outside of a zoo
or Everglades National Park," Michael Conover, a wildlife
management expert at the Berryman Institute, wrote in a 2008
editorial in the journal Human-Wildlife Conflicts. "Today,
alligators are abundant throughout the state."

Success breeds conflict

Similar success stories with wolves, bears, cougars and other
predators have resulted in human-animal encounters that don't
always end well for the human. During one deadly week in 2006,
three Florida women were killed and partly eaten by alligators in
separate incidents.

And as the number of gray wolves in the United States has soared
in recent years, the Department of the Interior may drop the
animal's
endangered-species status — a move that's setting off howls
of protest from conservationists.

"As we begin to recover a population of large carnivores, then it
becomes a decision that the public has to make about how they're
going to interact with them and where they're going to tolerate
[these] species," Wildlife Conservation Society scientist Jon
Beckmann told Live Science in a 2013 interview.

Why humans?

There are some people who claim that predators can develop a
taste for human flesh after trying it once, which may explain why
one individual animal is sometimes responsible for several human
attacks.

"Since human blood has more salt than animal blood, once wild
animals get the taste of salty blood, they do not like other
animals like deer," Maheshwor Dhakal, an ecologist at the
Department of National Parks and Wildlife Conservation in Nepal,
told CNN.

Dhakal was responding to concerns about 15 deaths in Nepal caused
by leopard attacks in 2011 and 2012. Most of the victims were
children, which is typically the case in wildlife predation of
humans — experts have found that the animals generally attack
smaller, younger people or those traveling alone or with just one
other person.

But the single greatest contributor to animal attacks on humans
is probably the encroachment of humans into animal habitat. The
population of Florida, for example, has increased from about 6.8
million in 1970 to almost 20 million today. And India currently
has 1.2 billion residents and is undergoing rapid development
nationwide.

With so much interaction between humans and large wildlife, the
two groups are losing their fear of each other.

"Fifty years ago, if somebody saw a wolf, they'd be terrified,
and they would go inside and bolt the front door of their house,"
Conover told CNN. "And now, of course, people travel to
Yellowstone National Park to see one, and they get as close as
they can to get a good photograph."